Tag: blogging

You asked for it and you got it. If you go on a vacation or you temporarily stop posting in a blog, you can now suspend the tracking at Keep on Posting (without deleting it) and activate it whenever you want.

What’s the difference between suspending and deleting? There are two. First, you still have the tracking on the list, so re-enabling is just one click, and you don’t have to remember which blog it was, it’s just there.

The second is that while in suspended mode we keep all the data we gathered and we keep on gathering data, so when you hit activate, we can analyze that data for you without having to re-fetch it and any long term analysis we’ll implement will be possible (blogs only publish the last 10 posts over feeds but we keep track of previous posts when we can).

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Whether you forget about your blog or your twitter account because you have more interesting things to do, or you are trying to run 100 different blogs, this tool might come in handy: Keep on Posting.

Keep on Posting periodically checks your blog, twitter account or anything that has a feed and analyses your posting frequency, if you are starting to post less frequent, it’ll send you an email.

My inspiration for making it is that I have hundreds of posts in draft mode, many of them finished already and all I’m missing is hitting the publish button… but sometimes… I just don’t log in into my blog for weeks.

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As stories can be told in first person, or third person, in the form of a diary or a tale, as book or comic or movie; I was thinking that blogging could be a literarly style as well.

I can think of two sub-genres. Historic and fantastic blogging.

For historic imagine a blog written in the context of -70 (minus 70) years. So that on October 19th 2009 you’d get a post for October 19th 1939. Who would be the blogger? It could be an important person, what would Churchil blog? Or it could be an unnamed person, an anti-nazi frenchman for example. They could also have a Twitter account! It would be an interesting way to learn history.

The other genre would be total fantasy. A blogger in the future, imagine if for some strange reason, blog posts of a guy surviving the singularity travel back in time? What if blog posts from a galaxy far away? I would certainly follow those blogs! But of course, it’s hard work that requires a very good writer.

Another thing that could be applied to any fictional blogging is having a network of blogs. Imagine reading the blogs of a frenchman in the resistance, a nazi soldier, a Russian red-army member. All blogging about the same, from different perspective! What about reading the Twitter feeds of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Saruman?

I think it would be very entertaining.

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In an effort to increase the quality of this blog I’ve engaged a couple of friends in reviewing my posts before they go out. I’m after typos, grammar and also “Are you serious? are you going to publish that crap?” or “You are going to get into trouble with that”.

The best way to do this, in my and in the opinion of many, is to let the reviewer modify the post freely and then check the diff. I suppose we are too used to work with source code, where diffs are a necessity.

I was positively surprised that WordPress can provide very nice colored diffs between each save of each post. Praise to WordPress! I was also surprised, but negatively, that WordPress doesn’t have a reviewer role. Users with the reviewer role would be able to edit unpublished posts but wouldn’t be able to modify published posts or publish drafts.

I was pointed to Role Scope, an amazing plug in for WordPress. I spent an hour creating a group and trying to give it the proper access, and as that failed, trying to limit the Editor role to only edit drafts. I failed at that too.

When I gave up and I went back to the usual blogging I found that Role Scoper allows you to give edit access to each post to any user. And that’s it. That’s what I’m using. Whenever I want something reviewed I give access only to that post to the user I want to review it. Quite simple.

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Going back to Plone, after using WordPress for a long while, and yet again inflicting a painful migration on myself, I ended up asking myself this question: What is a blog? and I’ve found an answer that really surprised me.

I’m a very structured person. Do you remember how everybody had a folder named MP3 back in 1999 or 2000, when MP3 became popular and people started to store music on their computers? Well, I didn’t have such a folder. My folder was called “music”. MP3 was only the format, what I had in that folder was, actually, music. And I even tried and convinced some people about doing the same. Continue reading “What is a blog?”